Re: [xml-dev] Does high quality data contain traceabilityinformation?

[Michael Kay <mike@saxonica.com>]

> 
> I am inclined to believe that traceability information is not useful. What do you think? 

It depends, obviously.

In applications like criminology, intelligence gathering, and genealogy, tracking provenance is crucial. A distinguishing characteristic of these applications is that data is intrinsically unreliable (it contains different people's interpretation or observations of the facts), so you will get conflicting information from different souces, and an important part of the purpose of the exercise is to enable resolution of these conflicts.

A lot of literary analysis, which is probably practised by more people on this list, also involves comparing and contrasting different sources - this time of a literary work rather than of evidence of facts. And obviously if you are comparing different sources, you need to know what those sources are.

But the accounting application I use for managing my company accounts also has traceability. If someone updates an invoice, it remembers who did so and when. I imagine that's required by auditors and accountancy standards organisations.

Michael Kay
Saxonica